When driving a car, judging the traffic conditions to the rear is completely dependent on the rear view mirrors. At night the inside rear view mirror currently in use often reflects bright objects directly into the eyes, especially when cars behind are using their high beams. This tends to make drivers very uncomfortable, tense or nervous and affects their judgement of distance jeopardizing safety.
Vehicles nowadays are all equipped with conventional rear view mirrors which are made by using a wedge-shaped glass with the thicker edge on the top and the thinner edge on the bottom (see FIGS. 1 and 2). These rear view mirrors have a feature which allows the driver to reduce the amount of the glare by changing its reflecting angle either upwardly or downward. This feature cuts down much of the glare, but it is still often not enough. Under certain conditions at night such as anytime another vehicle is driving too close behind with high beams on (because the intensity of light is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the light source), this change of the mirror's reflecting angle still does not reduce the glare enough to eliminate the discomfort or hazard. This is potentially very dangerous, especially when the vehicle keeps on following at the same distance. In order to remedy this condition, this invention was designed to improve upon the function of the mirror currently in use. It incorporates an additional glare-reducing mechanism producing a second stage glare-reducing effect which eliminates the glaring brightness that the conventional rear view mirrors cannot.
An automatic inside rear view mirror is used on the most recent models of Cadillac (General Motor Cooperation, U.S.A.), which consists of a photocell, sensitivity dial, on-off switch, probable a DC motor, etc. Although it is more convenient and useful than the manual one, it also has a disadvantage, namely, it sometimes jeopardizes safety, especially just before turning when there is a combination of cars behind with high beams and with low beams, in which case, the photocell being activated by the high beams, the low beams become too faint to be seen clearly. Although it has an on-off switch, it is difficult to manipulate in a hurry under such conditions. Moreover, unlike our new design it has only one stage rather than two stages of glare-reducing effect.